Mallika Yelandur's blog on all things related to Help and Learning at Adobe. Views expressed here are my own.

Adobe Kuler – capturing color inspiration!

I love colors and love to paint, so it’s no surprise that Adobe Kuler is my go-to app for color inspiration. Last week, Adobe announced the availability of the free Kuler iPhone app, and the new, revamped Kuler website. I’ve been playing around with the new website and the iPhone app, and I’m absolutely loving it!

Let’s do a quick tour of Adobe Kuler, its top features, and why I think every artist will enjoy Kuler.

What is Adobe Kuler?Kuler is a cloud-based application for creating color themes or color palettes using an iPhone or your browser. You can search, explore, and browse thousands of color themes in the Kuler community, and be inspired to create more color themes.

The web app is really nifty — move the markers on the interactive color wheel to individually select colors. Or choose the colors in your theme using a color rule or preset, such as Analogous, Monochromatic. The web app can be used on the desktop or tablet using your favorite browser.

The new Kuler iPhone app

The iPhone Kuler app lets you create a color theme from the colors around you. Just point your iPhone’s camera to any scene, painting, or any colorful composition that you like. Your Kuler app capture’s five points of color in any scene, and generates a color theme. Kuler provides you a number of options to tweak and save the color theme. You can fine tune the color swatch by selecting a color point and adjusting its position on the image, or choose a preset.

I love the ability to use Kuler color themes directly in Adobe Illustrator CC. Cloud-enabled features like Sync Color lets you quickly incorporate the captured colors into your vector artwork.

Another favorite is the Community feature that lets you explore hundreds of thousands of color themes created by other users. And with Creative Cloud integrated with Behance, you can seamlessly share your work with the creative community.

Searching through themes is really neat. You can sort by newest or most popular, keyword, hex value, creator name, and more. Making it really easy to find the right themes.

Color presets is again a great feature. The Kuler iPhone app provides you five presets such as Colorful and Muted. And in the Kuler web app, you can pick presets that follow color theory, like Analogous, Triad, Compound, and more.

For questions or feedback, please join the conversation on the Kuler forum.

Don’t miss watching the Kuler video

Seeing is believing! Watch this video, where Terry White take you on a tour of all the great features in Kuler.